From Wikipedia's page:
A Test of the News is a 1920 study done by
Walter Lippmann, a US journalist, and Charles Merz, later editorial page editor of the
New York Times.
They examined press coverage of the Bolshevik revolution for a
three-year period beginning with the overthrow of the Tsar in February
1917. They used the
New York Times as their source because of its reputation for accurate reporting.
Their study came out as a forty two page supplement to the
New Republic
in August 1920 and demonstrated that the Times' coverage was neither
unbiased nor accurate. They concluded that the paper's news stories were
not based on facts, but were "dominated by the hopes of the men who
composed the news organizations." The paper cited events that did not
happen, atrocities that never took place, and reported no fewer than
ninety-one times that the Bolshevik regime was on the verge of collapse.
"The news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men
wished to see," Lippmann and Merz charged. "The chief censor and the
chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and
editors."
This was published prior to 1923 in the United States. It is in the public domain and not in copyright.